“Please, don’t read it right now. I want you to wait until the voice inside you says,Now. Now’s the time.Trust yourself.”
Alice braced herself for an outcry, but Rebecca nodded as if in concurrence with a guru. Already Alice and her story seemed to be what the woman needed. She dropped the manila envelope into her briefcase and thanked Alice for her time.
Four weeks later Alice got the call.
On the phone, Rebecca spoke so deliberately it sounded like she had a drawl. She’d waited a week to read the story. “I’ve never waited that long to do anything,” she said, “but I knew that was the point.” Several times she’d considered opening it—in line at the grocery store, while she was waiting for a friend at a café, at her therapist’s office, in bed when she woke from a nightmare and couldn’t fall back to sleep, at the office as she was waiting for a call—then resisted. Once, in the dressing room at her favorite boutique, she got as far as sliding her index finger beneath the sealed adhesive on the back of the envelope, stopping when the paper sliced her flesh. “It was fate punishing me for my impatience. I knew it wasn’t the right time.”
A few days later, as she was sitting in the mildewy locker room at the public pool where she swam four mornings a week, she felt the pull. The other swimmers scurried around her, slipping hair beneath swim caps and washing off as quickly as possible so they could claim a lane. Normally, Rebecca beat them all. First through the lobby doors when the pool opened, first into the cool expanse of saline water, first to flip-turn after a length, last to get out of the pool when the hour window for lap swim ended. That morning she found herself wanting an unprecedented moment of calm before she joined the bustle that surrounded her. Once the other early morning swimmers had exited for the pool, everything was still. Alone at last, it was time to read the story.
It wasn’t reading so much as inhaling. She inhaled the story. “Does that make any sense?” she asked Alice, who confessed that that was what it felt like to write it too, as if she exhaled the entire story in one elongated breath. “I must have sat there for twenty minutes, like I was in some sort of trance. Then I put the pages back in my bag and went to the pool.”
Normally, she jumped into her lane and immediately began to cut through the water, swiftly, fluidly, her body coming alive with the movement. Today, she found herself wading by the wall, unwilling to move. She took off her cap and began to swim the side stroke, slowly, decadently, relishing the cool water as it combed her short hair. It took her several minutes to span the length of the Olympic pool, and when she turned, a slender figure in a Speedo was dropping feet-first into the other end of her lane, his body vertically slicing the water.
“Normally, I don’t like having to share a lane. Normally, I don’t like Speedos,” she said. “Normally, I don’t like to be the slowest.”
The man was a rocket, zooming up and down the pool, his body a fleeting apparition beside her. She mostly ignored him, luxuriating in the slow circular movements of her limbs. He was there and then gone, there and then gone again. When the lifeguard blew the whistle, warning that the pool would close in five minutes, he treaded water at the end of the lane, shooting liquid from a plastic bottle into his mouth. Rebecca did not speed up for her final lap. Instead, she tried to make it last as long as possible, wanting to hold on to that meditative feeling forever. When she finally reached the side of the pool, the man was still treading water, waiting for her.
He shoved his goggles to the top of his head, exposing deep indentations around his dark eyes, and smiled. “You’re normally the fastest one here.”
She held on to the cement lip of the pool, lifted her own goggles to expose the deep indentations around her pale eyes, and stared at him. “You’ve seen me before?”
“For the last year. I usually pace myself to you, but I can never keep up. You’re too fast.”
“Not today.” She smiled.
“Not today.” He smiled back. His name was Jonathan, and surprise, surprise, three weeks after they met, they were hopelessly in love.
“I guess your two-year goal isn’t so far off,” Alice said.
“We’ll see,” Rebecca responded. “Like you said, people have children in their forties all the time. Oh, Alice. I have to admit I was skeptical when Oliver told me about you. Consider me a convert. I hope you don’t mind—I gave your number to a few friends. You should be hearing from them soon.”
Rebecca hung up before Alice had a chance to tell her that she did mind. The story had been a favor to Gabby, a strong-armed one at that. She had no interest in writing additional stories fora few friendsshe’d never met. The notion caused her to panic. Already she’d lost control of whatever this social experiment was.
When Rebecca’s friends called later that week, four very different people with very different issues holding them back from finding love, Alice intended to refuse them. She was not a lexical matchmaker—Rebecca’s term, not hers. Her story did not make Rebecca fall in love. All Alice had done was teach Rebecca to relax enough to see the love that was already waiting for her. Jonathan had wanted to talk to her for months. When the moment presented itself, he made his move. Alice didn’t create that moment. She didn’t conjure Rebecca’s attraction to him. She didn’t give them a shared love of swimming. She’d just persuaded Rebecca to slow down.
Alice let the calls go to voicemail. She was still afraid of Rebecca, so she listened to the messages, planning to send polite texts of refusal. They’d been mistaken. Alice was not a matchmaker, lexical or otherwise. If they were looking for love, she could not help them.
“Is it true you can write a story that will make someone like me meet the love of my life? I’m not very special, I’m afraid,” Rebecca’s soft-spoken friend Jane had whispered into the phone.
“I don’t usually go for this sort of thing,” Crystal said plainly, “and I doubt it will work, but Rebecca said if I don’t talk to you myself, she’ll do it for me.”
“If you could find someone who wasn’t intimidated by Rebecca maybe you can find someone who loves me for my shortcomings too,” Peter said near tears. “There are a lot of them.”
“It’s worth a shot,” Beth said when she offered to pay Alice nearly four times her rent. “Don’t worry, when it doesn’t work out, I won’t ask for a refund.”
In much the same way Alice had diagnosed Rebecca upon meeting her, Alice identified what ailed these friends from their messages alone. Most people’s problems, Alice was beginning to discover, were pretty obvious. Everyone thinks they’re hiding their pain, their insecurities, their struggles. Really, most people are just so focused on their own issues that they aren’t particularly observant of others. If you stop for a second and look, really investigate someone, they unfold before you like a book. Most people, at least. Who knows, maybe once Jane, Crystal, Peter, and Beth got out of their own way, once Jane believed in herself, once Crystal let go of her pessimism, once Peter trusted he was worthy of love, once Beth stopped self-sabotaging, maybe they would find love.
So Alice said yes to these four souls with no inkling of the stories she would write for them. Once again, as soon as she committed to the task, it followed a pattern: it began with a strong sense of how she wanted to help the reader, then a walk to clear her head, an image so fully formed that it hit her physically, a prickling from her arms to the rest of her body, a whirling mind, a sleepless night, a story she hadn’t written so much as channeled.
Surprise, surprise. Four more stories led to four more couples madly in love.
After reading Alice’s story, Jane was so struck by its beauty that she signed up for a creative writing class, having always dreamed of telling stories of her own but never quite summoning the courage to pursue it. In the class she met Dawn, who had confidence to spare. Dawn was not a gifted writer and didn’t care. She wrote because she loved it. Her honest assessment of her own mediocrity made her belief in Jane’s talent more trustworthy, so much so that even Jane could not deny it. To Alice, the truly astonishing part of the story was that Jane had seen beauty in Alice’s words, so much so that they inspired her to write too.
After reading Alice’s story, Crystal decided to purge her house of all the things she’d grown pessimistic about, the bedsheets that would never be new again, the lights that always seemed too dim. She boxed up the bulk of her belongings and brought them to a local charity, where Kiran, a volunteer, marveled at each of her donations as he registered them into their system. “Even his name,” Crystal told Alice, “is a ray of light.”
Peter had always known that his best friend, Trish, desired him, but he believed it was the unavailability she craved. He knew she would begin to lose interest the moment he asked her out. As he read Alice’s story, which was not about a chase, a conquest, a game but an old mutt, scraggly and balding, too sweet not to love, he retraced the reasoning that led him to conclude Trish wasn’t really interested in him and found little evidence to support this conviction. When he finally confessed his feelings to Trish, instead of retreating, she dove right in.
At first Beth was devastated by Alice’s story about a doomed matriarchy, how depressing and hopeless it was. She wandered down to the train tracks and, unable to contain her sadness anymore, sat on the rails and cried. Distracted by how much worse she felt, she didn’t hear the train approaching. In the background, someone shouted. It sounded far off, distant, until her body rose from the tracks just before the train rushed by. Her hair twirled around her face, and she couldn’t see who had saved her. When the draft off the train settled, she saw soulful brown eyes searching hers, asking if she was okay. She understood that she was.
